Salary Cap Draft Mastery: Part 5, Bidding Strategies

Photo: USA Today Sports

If you haven’t yet, it’s a good idea to go back and read the first four parts of this salary cap draft series before you dive into bidding strategies.

Part 1, Basic Concepts
Part 2, Building Your Skill Set
Part 3, Preparation
Part 4, Nomination Strategies

After Part 4 told you how to craft your nomination strategy, you can now work on what to do once the player is out there. There isn’t as much nuance in your bidding strategies in a salary cap draft as there is when picking a player to nominate, but there are still some things you can do to try and maximize your value when bidding.

As a general rule, the best way to avoid a big mistake from a poor bid in a salary cap draft is to not get fancy. While you are getting comfortable with the other drafters, their tendencies, and the unique process of a salary cap draft, you should follow the simple rule of bidding one dollar more than the previous bid. Your goal is to take as much guesswork off your plate as you can and trying to craft the perfect bid every time you’re in the middle of a bidding war is sure to lead to mistakes for all but the most veteran of drafters.

The way to think of your bidding in a salary cap draft is to keep things simple. There are situations in which jumping the bid by more than $1 is appropriate but think about this example as a reason for caution. Let’s say you have targeted Jaylen Waddle as your WR2. You think that getting him in your league for less than $27 would be a steal, and you’re hoping he stays under $30. When Waddle is nominated, you find yourself bidding with someone dollar for dollar, slowly up towards $15. You know what you’ll pay for Waddle, so you decide to make a bid to throw off your opponent. You call out, “$26!” The reasoning behind the bid is solid. You’ll pay $27, and in most rooms, he’s over $30, so if you land him for $26, you’re doing well, right? The problem is, you’ll never know if that was as cheap as you could’ve landed him. Sure, $26 for Waddle is a great price, but you’ll never know if you could’ve got him for $25, $24, or less. Your job when you bid is to squeeze every dollar out of every play you make throughout your salary cap draft. When you make a bid like that, you eliminate the chance to do that. Making a ‘shock bid’ like this isn’t necessarily wrong, but it should be used sparingly so that you don’t waste money guessing whether or not you could’ve got a player cheaper.

The other benefit of keeping your bids simple is that it helps you deal with difficult league mates. There are always going to be managers in a salary cap draft room who are over-aggressive with their bidding. They’ll put huge bids in immediately when a top player is introduced, or they’ll end up in a bidding war with someone shouting bids back and forth without thinking about the price. This can be frustrating when you’re against someone like that and badly need to land a player, but don’t get caught up in their aggressiveness. Instead, cool things down by pausing for a few seconds after they bid before you respond with $1 above their bid. Don’t show weakness, but don’t feed into the runaway train, either.

Here are some other things to think about when it comes to bidding in your salary cap draft.

Have a Reason

Too many managers in a salary cap draft get into the habit of throwing out bids on players they like without thinking about how it furthers their goals in the draft. It is imperative to always have a reason for bidding. Of course, you want to bid on a player you like, but if that’s your only reason, that’s not sound salary cap draft strategy. You should ask yourself the following questions before you bid:

• Do I need this player, or do I want this player?
• Do I have the salary cap to pay for the player while sticking to my strategy?
• How many roster spots do I have left, and how will landing this player affect my future in the draft?
• Is the player cheap enough that you can’t pass up a bid?
• Is the player expensive, but you need the player bad enough that you have to bid?

Two factors exist that have a push-and-pull relationship with each other. On one side is the price of the player, and on the other is your current team need. Sometimes, this produces some odd results when you go through these questions, but they are important. For example, if you already have your top three wide receivers for your team and Tee Higgins comes up for bid, you are somewhat limited in what you can do. If the Higgins bidding stops at $9, you have to weigh whether or not that is cheap enough to bid or whether you have to pass on the deal. The unfortunate side effect of going through this sequence of questions is that you will have to pass on some deals along the way. You simply can’t buy every player who goes cheaper than they should. There are plenty of managers who can’t pass up a deal, and they’ll get stuck with a lot of decent players for solid prices, but it hems them in at the end of the draft. This often leads to a roster that is unexciting and that fills up before it should.

So, all you have to do to avoid that trap is to juxtapose your need against the price of the player. If Higgins is about to go for $3 or $21, the decision is much easier. You can’t afford to pass on him for the former price, and you can’t afford to bid on him for the latter. But when it’s somewhere in the middle, you have to look at price versus need while not forgetting that part of that equation is how many roster spots you have left. It can be a complicated formula that you have to assess in the middle of a bidding war, but you can train yourself to quickly run through those concepts by deliberately paying attention to these principles as you draft. It takes time and repetition, but anyone can learn.